It’s a hypothetical question, really, because Beckham has certainly owned a lot of footballs. But let’s just consider the ball that he famously kicked in 1996 from the halfway line, the one that landed spectacularly in Wimbledon’s net and helped make him famous in both the UK and abroad. So you could argue that this ball should end up in a British museum, given Beckham’s huge impact on sports culture in the UK at the turn of the 21st...

Civilian society constantly makes use of aerospace and military inventions: Can anyone say the Internet? Or transparent braces? (These nearly invisible dental devices are made from a material called polycrystalline alumina, which was initially developed by NASA “to protect the infrared antennae of heat-seeking missile trackers,” notes Discovery.com) Cultural heritage also borrows from NASA: Portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy...

Are you looking for research dollars to support your scintillating art or artifact science project? Tomorrow there’s a grant proposal deadline for the National Science Foundation’s Culture Heritage Science fund (also referred to as SCIART). The program was launched last year, injecting an initial $3.2 million to address, “the grand challenges in cultural heritage science,” explains NSF’s Zeev Rosenzweig, who helped start the program....

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